This news report published in the newspaper Le Soir in 1939 explains how they were used.

With a vigourous swing of his elbow, Mr Moreau, a city street cleaner, broke the glass on the police call box: “Hello Police? A body in a bag! Here in front of 88 Boulevard de La Chapelle!”

Looking at the object, situated here on the Carrefour Bineau, just at the entrance to Neuilly sur Seine, it would seem that you broke the glass (long since gone here of course), pressed the button and communicated via the grills beneath and on the sides.

>more

In the early evening of Saturday, March 11, 1944, police were summoned to the street. One Jacques Marçais from the apartment building at Number 22 had called the cops because five days previously the chimney of an uninhabited townhouse had started to spew a pestilential smoke and all the street’s residents were feeling sick. Two cops turned up on their bikes – it was wartime and France, thus Paris, was occupied by Hitler’s Nazi Germany and because of gasoline (petrol) rationing the bike had become the major means of transport. After a while of standing around they asked their station house to send some fire fighters to what had once been the most elegant property on the street but which had become dilapidated, it having stood uninhabited for a few years.
The firemen, having broken into the bolted house, found that someone or perhaps a group of people – they had the Gestapo whose security and intelligence service (the Sicherheitsdienst) was just around the corner on Avenue Foch in mind – was getting rid of a large number of bodies by burning them in the furnace of an old rusty water boiler in the house’s basement.

>more

The store owner, Claire’s boss, had been alone in the boutique on a Saturday in May. A man came in wrapped up in a scarf and trenchcoat and hat, even though it was a warm day. He kept looking around, and once they were alone in the store, he walked up to the cash register, pulled out a gun, pointed it at the owner, and demanded the money in the caisse. Trembling, the store owner turned it over to him.

It wasn’t much money– about 400 euros.

The store owner went to the police immediately and they were reassuring. This kind of thing never happened twice. They took down all the details anyway.

On Monday, the store owner told the other employees about the incident. That same day, a second employee was in the store alone and the same person came in. The hat, the scarf, the gun. This time, the robber got about 200 euros.

Claire worked on Wednesday.

“I was angoissée,” she said. “Two policemen were hiding in the office, and there were more in cars outside. We were all sure the man would come back. And when no one was in the shop, he did. J’ai eu mal au coeur [I felt sick] when I saw him come in, dressed exactly the same– the trenchcoat, the hat, the scarf wrapped around his face. He looked around to make sure we were alone, and then he came up to the cash register and pulled out a gun. ‘Give me all the money!’ he said.

>more

This one was a small white plaque screwed into a brick wall in a non-descript back street, but what particularly stood out was the date of the law. This was not the standard 1881 decree, but rather one that dated from 1943 and France’s infamous Vichy regime.

As the scrawled message on the plaque says, this was indeed a ‘loi Pétainiste‘ (or rather a ‘loi Laval‘), but what exactly is being forbidden here?

The message writer here has spotted the date, and looked to make comparisons between France’s collaborist state during the Second World War and today’s perceived authoritarian rulers, but in reality the law mentioned is rather banal. However, it is also one that had a big effect on the way French cities looked.

>more

The only thing worse than a vandalizing, squatting French person is a syndic. That is the name for the company that “manages” a building. I have other names for the syndic, but they are not printable on a family blog such as this. Heading to the syndic in person–its employees don’t answer the phone–I asked what I could do in my predicament. “We have no idea,” the clerk told me. I stepped backwards and looked around me. “Hold on–am I at the syndic?” I asked. “The company I pay to manage the building’s affairs?” “Yes,”  the woman said, setting down her 11th espresso for the day, “But this is a personal affair.” Ah. A personal affair. The syndic woman had just one piece of advice for me: “If you touch her belongings, she can sue you.” I decided that lying would be the only solution to the problem. I called the squatteuse back and informed her that the syndic rules called for a 48-hour grace period during which she had to move out. “After that, I have the right to put your stuff in the garbage,” I lied. Well, it worked. Her crap is gone. And now I have to buy and install a new lock, and pray no one else eyeballs my 5 square meters of land.

In the 1960s the arrondissement changed. Factories south of Rue Tolbiac moved out to the grande banlieue (suburbs) for financial reasons and real estate promoters began to construct tall apartment blocks  – not skyscrapers but buildings of 15/18 floors which the Parisians called a tour – tower – nonetheless. Those were the years of Vietnam and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians flocked to Paris to seek asylum with their former colonial master (De Gaulle told both President Kennedy and Johnson not to go into Vietnam because it will be a war they would not be able to win – but that is another story) and joined the Chinese immigrants who were already here, and as the toursof the 13^th were standing unoccupied because the French refused to live in them, that was where the French government housed the Asian refugees. And so that part of the 13th became Chinatown.

>more